Tara Rebele
from Tea and Small Bones
This is a game of hatpins and withers.
Of bitter and fenugreek, spasm and gland.
Thrush and suckle the hilltop its hindmilk.
A once apart, the murmur a salve.
Crusted with envy when green is a consequence.
Apple your tart with fragrant and wet.
Your faith is an orgy, fathom and pedestal.
A contest with evidence tucked in its crisp.
Reason is creosote, thick and conservative.
Joist against ripening, seed to the tongue.
Your fear is a crease in the soft of the skeptical.
Puncture the fruit, its ovarian hiss.
This is a point. You’re pushing the sharp of it.
Asking the callous that solders you shut.
Coaxed by the hollow to forage for symptoms.
A sapsucker manic in timberless woods.
Skirting the sin when morning’s your circumstance.
Feed her a memory, the air of your son.
Desperate is porous, weaned and unfaithful.
Butterflies stitching their uterine hems.
The acres are gray since you last disappeared in them.
Fish with hooked fingers scrape through the char.
Her whisper is viscous, a dripping umbilical.
Happen or hasten to gather your curd.
If we were spiraling into the cunt of it.
Would you suspect the wet when it came?
If I could wash you with shards of last winter.
To scour the struggle still warm on your cheek.
If is the surrogate, you are the foreigner.
Burning the house out of all you have left.
I am the bird that slips through an aftermath.
Distance a tangle too thin for its task.
__________
Tara Rebele has performed and exhibited her text-based multimedia works worldwide. Her first book, And I’m Not Jenny: Performance :: Writing, was published in 2005 by Slope Editions. Her poems have appeared in Poetry International, Volt, How2, Handsome, and Shearsman, among other places. She is Director of the New England College MFA Creative Writing Program.
from Tea and Small Bones
This is a game of hatpins and withers.
Of bitter and fenugreek, spasm and gland.
Thrush and suckle the hilltop its hindmilk.
A once apart, the murmur a salve.
Crusted with envy when green is a consequence.
Apple your tart with fragrant and wet.
Your faith is an orgy, fathom and pedestal.
A contest with evidence tucked in its crisp.
Reason is creosote, thick and conservative.
Joist against ripening, seed to the tongue.
Your fear is a crease in the soft of the skeptical.
Puncture the fruit, its ovarian hiss.
This is a point. You’re pushing the sharp of it.
Asking the callous that solders you shut.
Coaxed by the hollow to forage for symptoms.
A sapsucker manic in timberless woods.
Skirting the sin when morning’s your circumstance.
Feed her a memory, the air of your son.
Desperate is porous, weaned and unfaithful.
Butterflies stitching their uterine hems.
The acres are gray since you last disappeared in them.
Fish with hooked fingers scrape through the char.
Her whisper is viscous, a dripping umbilical.
Happen or hasten to gather your curd.
If we were spiraling into the cunt of it.
Would you suspect the wet when it came?
If I could wash you with shards of last winter.
To scour the struggle still warm on your cheek.
If is the surrogate, you are the foreigner.
Burning the house out of all you have left.
I am the bird that slips through an aftermath.
Distance a tangle too thin for its task.
__________
Tara Rebele has performed and exhibited her text-based multimedia works worldwide. Her first book, And I’m Not Jenny: Performance :: Writing, was published in 2005 by Slope Editions. Her poems have appeared in Poetry International, Volt, How2, Handsome, and Shearsman, among other places. She is Director of the New England College MFA Creative Writing Program.